Streetscapes/9 East 72nd Street; A School's Grand House That Could Be Private Again

FREQUENTLY when institutions take over private houses, their renovations so change the original interiors that later buyers face great hurdles in recapturing the buildings for residential occupancy. But since 1964, when the Lycee Francais took over the 1896 Henry Sloane House, the school's alterations have been surprisingly benign -- raising the possibility that the eventual buyer of the building, which is now on the market along with the school's other properties, could return it to its original use as an extraordinary private residence.

In the early 1890's, Henry and Jessie Sloane were living on 54th Street, but Midtown was almost fully developed and the streets next to Central Park were being built up as the new luxury quarter. Sloane was an executive at W.& J. Sloane, the family firm established in 1843, and the company was running at full tilt carpeting and furnishing the new mansions, hotels and clubs of New York.

In 1894, Sloane hired the architects Carrere & Hastings, whose founders had worked for McKim, Mead & White, to design one of the most sumptuous town houses to survive in New York. Sloane bought a 54-foot site at 9 East 72nd Street, just off Central Park, a block that already had the mansions of the Tiffanys, Cuttings and other families. Carrere & Hastings pioneered the French style of New York and they pumped the new Sloane House up to colossal Francophilian proportions, all in limestone.

Above a ground story of rusticated stone rises a double-height screen of columns bracketing giant French windows with garlands, cartouches, scrolls and other details applied in profusion. This midsection supports the fourth floor, a mansard roof with dormers screened by a balustrade.

The streets in this section filled up with such mansions, many of them in the exuberantly French style of the Sloane House, like the Jennings House next door at 7 East 72nd Street, built in 1898. In 1900, Architectural Annual published a picture of the two houses with an ironic commentary using the French expression for an urban town house ''Enigmas: Hotels particuliers a New York -- BUT not the French Quarter.''

The Sloane House was completed in 1896, and Jessie Sloane gave a dinner dance for 200 in January 1897, which included the cream of New York society -- but not, according to newspaper reports, her husband. Indeed, Henry Sloane soon moved out to a hotel and divorced his wife in 1899. Within five hours she remarried, taking as her husband Perry Belmont, a diplomat and prominent figure in the Democratic Party.

Mr. Sloane considered himself the injured party and extracted an unusual concession -- Jessie Sloane could have no contact with their two daughters, Jessie, 15, and Emily, 10, until they were 21. She could not write to them nor even speak to them on the street, although The New York Tribune noted that the order might be rescinded if she could show, after several years, that she ''had led a moral life.''

After this, neither of the Sloanes wanted their palatial house -- the Belmonts moved to Washington and Henry Sloane, who never remarried, built a much more modest house for himself and his daughters at 18 East 68th Street.

He rented 9 East 72nd Street for a year or two to the publisher Joseph Pulitzer but sold it in 1901 to James Stillman. Stillman, backed by the Rockefeller family, had built the National City Bank into one of the nation's largest. At his death in 1918, The New York Times said he was worth $100 million. Perhaps Stillman's real aim was to control development in the area -- he had already hired McKim, Mead & White to design a massive granite house at the northeast corner of 72nd and Fifth.

But that project never went ahead, and Stillman remained in 9 East 72nd. The census returns for 1900 and 1910 give an idea of the operating scale of a big private house. In 1900, Joseph Pulitzer lived there with a family of six and 17 servants. In 1910, James Stillman, then unmarried and without family, lived there with nine servants.

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After Stillman's death, 9 East 72nd went to John Sanford, a multimillionaire carpet manufacturer. By the time of Sanford's death in 1939, there were too few millionaires for too many mansions, and they were routinely bulldozed or turned over to institutions after World War II. In 1947, 9 East 72nd Street was converted for a religious organization, but with few changes, especially to the principal rooms.

In 1964, the Lycee Francais, established in 1936, bought both 7 and 9 East 72nd. Now the school's collection of buildings has reached six town houses, including the large ones at 3 East 95th Street and 60 East 93rd Street, an unparalleled portfolio of high style architecture.

LAST summer, the school announced it was putting the entire group on the market and the school has begun work on a single building at 75th Street and York Avenue designed by Polshek & Partners, which is scheduled to be completed in the fall of 2002.

The future owner of 9 East 72nd Street will get a spectacularly intact interior. The oak and iron entry doors lead into a 22-by-28-foot hall with leaded glass windows and a grand fireplace. On a recent visit, students were crowding around a papier-mache snowman project -- a ''bonhomme de neige'' to them -- underneath a plaster ceiling of putti, swags, helmets, spears and other classical ornamentation.

The school's changes have also been benign. A sprinkler line runs right above an early drapery rod with its rings intact. A lightweight wall screens off the second story of the two-story-high stairwell, which curves up past intact torchiers and other fixtures. No one has glommed up the heavily worked metal balustrade with paint -- indeed the green tint and gold highlights may be the original finish.

In the rest of the house, the usually transitory items -- sconces, glass beaded light fixtures, chandeliers, doorknobs and the like -- are astoundingly intact. It would have been easy for an indifferent owner to have sold them for scrap at any time in the past.

On the second floor, the front rooms are, save for another dividing wall, intact -- a 28-by-46-foot salon and a 25-by-26-foot drawing room. But the school has added on a chaste modern conservatory in the rear, now a lunchroom. Above this level are the sleeping and servants' rooms, also with relatively minor changes.

Paul Massey, president of Massey Knakal Realty Services, is handling the sale for the school and says that the school is entertaining multiple bids. He thinks it is more likely that the group will be split up rather than sold as a single lot. He expects 9 East 72nd Street to sell for something ''pretty close to the $30 million'' asking price, which works out to about $1,500 a square foot.

Because of the intrinsic architectural quality of 9 East 72nd Street and its relative integrity, he thinks that there is an even chance it would be converted back to a private house, which would probably make it the most remarkable new-old residence in 21st century New York.